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Scientific Linux Security Update : nss and nspr on SL5.x i386/x86_64

Critical Nessus Plugin ID 77955

Synopsis

The remote Scientific Linux host is missing one or more security updates.

Description

A flaw was found in the way TLS False Start was implemented in NSS. An attacker could use this flaw to potentially return unencrypted information from the server. (CVE-2013-1740)A race condition was found in the way NSS implemented session ticket handling as specified by RFC 5077. An attacker could use this flaw to crash an application using NSS or, in rare cases, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running that application.(CVE-2014-1490)It was found that NSS accepted weak Diffie-Hellman Key exchange (DHKE) parameters. This could possibly lead to weak encryption being used in communication between the client and the server. (CVE-2014-1491)An out-of-bounds write flaw was found in NSPR. A remote attacker could potentially use this flaw to crash an application using NSPR or, possibly, execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running that application. This NSPR flaw was not exposed to web content in any shipped version of Firefox. (CVE-2014-1545)It was found that the implementation of Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) hostname matching in NSS did not follow the RFC 6125 recommendations. This could lead to certain invalid certificates with international characters to be accepted as valid.(CVE-2014-1492)The nss and nspr packages have been upgraded to upstream version 3.16.1 and 4.10.6 respectively, which provide a number of bug fixes and enhancements over the previous versions.This update also fixes the following bugs : - Previously, when the output.log file was not present on the system, the shell in the Network Security Services (NSS) specification handled test failures incorrectly as false positive test results. Consequently, certain utilities, such as 'grep', could not handle failures properly. This update improves error detection in the specification file, and 'grep' and other utilities now handle missing files or crashes as intended. - Prior to this update, a subordinate Certificate Authority (CA) of the ANSSI agency incorrectly issued an intermediate certificate installed on a network monitoring device. As a consequence, the monitoring device was enabled to act as an MITM (Man in the Middle) proxy performing traffic management of domain names or IP addresses that the certificate holder did not own or control. The trust in the intermediate certificate to issue the certificate for an MITM device has been revoked, and such a device can no longer be used for MITM attacks. - Due to a regression, MD5 certificates were rejected by default because Network Security Services (NSS) did not trust MD5 certificates. With this update, MD5 certificates are supported in Scientific Linux 5.